Last summer, whenever I had finished
my day's work, I used to go wandering in
certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old countryman, and talk to
him about his work and about the woods, and once or twice a friend came with me
to whom he would open his heart more readily than to me, He had spent all his
life lopping away the witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam
from the paths, and had thought much about the natural and supernatural
creatures of the wood. He has heard the hedgehog--'grainne oge,' he calls
him--'grunting like a Christian,' and is certain that he steals apples by
rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to every
quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in the woods,
have a language of their own--some kind of old Irish. He says, 'Cats were
serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of some great change
in the world. That is why they are hard
to kill, and why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it
might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would be
the serpent's tooth.' Sometimes he thinks they change into wild cats, and then a
nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild cats are not the same as
the marten cats, who have been always in the woods. The foxes were once tame, as
the cats are now, but they ran away and became wild. He talks of all wild
creatures except squirrels--whom he hates--with what seems an affectionate
interest, though at times his eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers
how he made hedgehogs unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of
burning straw under them.
I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and supernatural
very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats like, above all,
to be in the 'forths' and lisses after
nightfall; and he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story
about a spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a
marten cat--a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work in the
garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house where there was a loft
full of apples, and all night he could hear people rattling plates and knives
and forks over his head in the loft. Once, at any rate, be has seen an unearthly
sight in the woods. He says, 'One time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy,
and about eight o'clock one morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts,
with her hair hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good,
clean face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way gaudy
but simple, and when she felt me coming she gathered herself up and was gone as
if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her and looked for her,
but I never could see her again from that day to this, never again.' He
used the word clean as we would use words like fresh or comely.
Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods. A labourer told us of
what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is called Shanwalla,
from some old village that was before the weed. He said, 'One evening I parted
from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he went away through the
path in Shanwalla, anā bid me goodnight. And two hours after, there he was back again in
the yard, an' bid me light a candle that was in the stable. Anā he told me that
when he got into Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but
having a head as big as a man's body, came beside him and led him out of the
path anā round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then it
vanished and left him.'
A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain deep
pool in the river. She said, 'I came over the stile from the chapel, and others
along with me; and a great blast of wind came and two trees were bent and broken
and fell into the river, and the splash of water out of it went up to the skies.
And those that were with me saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting
there by the bank where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was
headless.'
A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went to
catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of hazel and
creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side is for a little
clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with him, 'I bet a button that
if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will stay on it,' meaning that the bush
was so matted the pebble would not be able to go through it. So he took up 'a
pebble of cow-dung, and as soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music that
ever was heard.' They ran away, and when they had gone about two hundred yards
they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white, walking round and round the
bush. 'First it had the form of a woman, and then of a man, and it was going
round the bush.'

II

I often entangle myself in
argument more complicated than even those paths of
Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at other times I say as
Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion about a nymph
of the Illissus, 'The common opinion is enough for me.' I believe when I am in the mood
that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are
ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond
any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in
pleasant and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood
without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something
I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times
explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so
deep a hold has this imagination upon me. You too meet with a like imagination,
doubtless, somewhere, wherever your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving
you to the woods, or the Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of
a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers
imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague
presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net
we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it
better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither
and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the
finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves. I say to myself,
when I am well out of that thicket of argument, that they are surely there, the
divine people, for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied
them, and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen
them and even spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off,
as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures
simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite us to all
romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among blue hills, or come to
that whereof all romance is but

'Foreshadowings mingled with the images
Of man's misdeeds in greater days than these,'

as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good
spirits.